[Tuxmath-devel] Factoroids number generation

[David B. <dav...@gm...>]

Hi Aviral,

I worked on factoroids a bit to try to prevent rocks with invalid
numbers.  I wrote a validate_numbers() function which basically
factors out all the valid primes, leaving 1 if the number is valid for
that wave, or a larger prime (say, 83) if the number is invalid.

It turns out that generate_numbers() *always* creates valid results
(or at it least did in a test run of 10,000,000 iterations).  So I
feel confident that your function is fine.  Somehow, these invalid
asteroids are getting created when the larger numbers get broken down
during gameplay, probably due to some sort of float-integer conversion
issue.  I'm not quite sure of the exact issue, but now
FF_add_asteroid() just returns and prints an error message if it is
passed an invalid number, so they don't show up in the game.

Anyway, the "new" factoroids is shaping up to be a really cool
educational game, thanks to great work from you and the rest of the
Google Code-In contributors.

Best,

David Bruce